Gee,
only two weeks into the new year and I’ve already got a case of the “what
ifs?” What if we had an honest government? What if our media told the truth?
What if Americans studied world history, or, for that matter, their own?

Really, you’d think with all those bestselling biographies of the Founding
Fathers floating around -– John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander
Hamilton, etc. -- people would be learning something. But I guess they never
do. “I wander alone, and ponder,” as Adams said. “I muse, I mope, I
ruminate. We have not men fit for the times.”

I’m
talking about “the Bush and Hitler thing,” as I see it called, the giant
flap created last week over a couple of TV ads that never aired. These
commercials –- two of them -- were entries in the “Bush in 30 Seconds”
campaign, a nationwide competition for anti-Bush TV spots sponsored by the
MoveOn.org Voter Fund.
According to news reports, one of the submissions “mixed images of Hitler
and Nazi militarism with Bush taking the oath of office. The other quoted
Hitler and Bush as saying they acted in God's name to vanquish their
enemies” –- a statement of fact, inasmuch as both men did, and do, say such
things.

Let me
repeat: Neither of these commercials was aired. Before being removed, they
sat briefly with about 1500 others on the Bush in 30 Seconds Web site,
having “slipped through” MoveOn's screening process in violation of its
written guidelines asking for no submissions that were “inappropriate for
television,” whatever that means.

"None
of these was our ad,” explained MoveOn’s co-founder, Wes Boyd, “nor did
their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by the MoveOn.org
Voter Fund. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler
submissions.”

Why
not, I wonder? I’ve compared Bush to Hitler from the moment of his
“election” and I don’t apologize for it. I don’t say they’re the same – I
say they’re alike. Both were nonentities before they came to power. Both had
no experience for the job. Like Hitler, Bush lies, consistently and
constantly, and, like Hitler, he uses ends to justify means. As
he said himself, so famously, during the last election, “If this was a
dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier – just so long as I’m the
dictator.”

In
fact, there was no one out there to be offended by the Bush-and-Hitler
commercials until “Jewish leaders and Republicans” –- I quote the Los
Angeles Times -- raised a stink and accused MoveOn of – well, what is
the accusation? As of Monday, the only place you could find these ads was on
the Web site of the Republican National Committee, beneath a disingenuous
rant about “despicable tactics” and a call for all Democratic presidential
contenders to disavow the message of some ads that no one saw.

“Such
ads are anything but appropriate for television,” says RNC Chairman Ed
Gillespie, “and MoveOn.org should apologize for posting [them].” MoveOn has
apologized for posting them, but apparently this is insufficient penance for
the self-incensed.

"To
compare the president of the United States, his fight against al-Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein, with the politics of Hitler is ... shameful, it is beyond
the pale, and has no place in the legitimate discourse of American
politics," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Los Angeles. “Adolf Hitler was responsible for the greatest crime
in the history of mankind – the Holocaust. To compare Hitler to an American
President is not only ludicrous, but defames the Holocaust.”

At the
same time, Rabbi Hier condemns Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei for
saying, over the weekend, that Israel is seeking “an apartheid solution” to
the Palestine problem, as evidenced by the great big wall it’s been building
around the citizens of the West Bank. And no “debasement” exists,
presumably, in the words of Grover Norquist, the Republican Party’s “prophet
of permanence,” who recently remarked on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air”
program that the American estate tax, affecting some two per cent of the
population, reflects “the
morality of the Holocaust.”

“Excuse me,” said “Fresh Air’s” sturdy hostess, Terry Gross. “Excuse me one
second. Did you just … compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?”

"No,”
said Norquist, fumbling for words, “the morality that says it's okay to do
something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is
the morality that says the Holocaust is okay because they didn't target
everybody, just a small percentage."

Ah.
And there’s nothing wrong, either, I suppose, with New York Post
columnist Ralph Peters attacking Howard Dean and his “Internet Gestapo,” as
he did last week, right in the middle of the MoveOn fuss. Not a peep about
it from Republicans, rabbis or the so-called free press.

"These
are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts,” Peters wrote. “Had
Goebbels enjoyed access to the Internet, he would have used the same swarm
tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts … It's Goebbels again: Just keep repeating
the lies until the lies assume the force of truth.”

The
truth, I’m afraid, is that no one owns history, no one owns Hitler and no
one owns the Holocaust, not even the Jews. I know what I’m in for when I
make that statement, but I believe it needs to be said.

“So
far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same
course as Hitler,” writes an unnamed reader, a survivor of the Nazi
occupation of Europe, on the Web site TruthOut.org: “And I've seen far too
many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The
rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive
war'.”